How Animals Grieve
Read How Animals Grieve Online
Authors: Barbara J. King
BARBARA
J. KING
is professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary. She is the author or editor of many books, including
Being with Animals
. She writes regularly for National Public Radio’s
13.7: Cosmos & Culture
blog and reviews for the
Times Literary Supplement
.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
©
2013 by Barbara J. King
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43694-4 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04372-2 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Barbara J., 1956–
How animals grieve / Barbara J. King.
pages ; cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-226-43694-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-226-04372-2 (e-book)
1. Grief in animals. 1. Title.
QL785.27.K56 2013
591.5—dc
23
2012045012
This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
How
Animals Grieve
BARBARA J. KING
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
FOR
CHARLIE, SARAH, AND BETTY
AND FOR CATS MICKEY AND HORUS,
GRAY & WHITE AND MICHAEL,
RABBITS CARAMEL AND OREO,
AND EVERY OTHER ANIMAL WE HAVE
LOVED AND LOST
EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING
BUT YOU’RE MISSING.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
CONTENTS
7. CHIMPANZEES:
CRUEL TO BE KIND
9. SEA OF EMOTION:
DOLPHINS, WHALES, AND TURTLES
10. NO BOUNDARIES:
CROSS-SPECIES GRIEF
13. ON BISON DEATH IN YELLOWSTONE AND OBITUARIES OF ANIMALS
PROLOGUE
ON GRIEF AND LOVE
One individual lies immobile, apart from the group. Everyone else rushes about, doing her work and keeping the high-functioning community running at top pitch. But the lone one lies dead—and ignored.
After about two days, a smell begins to waft from the body, a strong chemical odor. Soon, another individual comes by and carries the corpse to a nearby graveyard, where it joins many others—an efficient process of disposal. No one mourns.
Is this a scene from a zombie thriller, that often revived standby of Hollywood, Burbank, and, recently, the publishing industry? What real-life culture could treat its dead in this cold, mechanical way? Humans everywhere engage in elaborate rituals: preparing the body, comforting the bereaved, ushering the newly dead into an afterlife (or at least the cold, hard ground).
No, this graveyard scenario comes not from humans but from ants. Biologist E. O. Wilson observed the pattern in the 1950s: an ant dies, it lies ignored for some days, and then another ant comes and carries the body to the ant equivalent of a cemetery. The release of oleic acid from the ant’s body, about two days after death, triggers the carrying response in other ants, Wilson told Robert Krulwich on National Public Radio in 2009.
Should a curious scientist borrow an ant, dab oleic acid onto its body, and return it to an ant trail, that ant—very much alive—will also be carried off to a graveyard, struggling all the while. Death-related behavior in these insects is, as far as we can tell, driven purely by chemicals.
While
it’s possible that entomologists just don’t know how to recognize displays of insect emotion, I’m comfortable in hypothesizing that ants don’t feel grief for their dead comrades.
Within the animal kingdom, ants are an extreme example. No one would expect a chimpanzee or an elephant to respond so mechanically to a whiff of chemicals. Chimpanzees and elephants are veritable “poster species” for animal cognition and emotion. Intelligent planners and problem-solvers, these big-brained mammals are emotionally attached to others in their communities. Finicky about with whom they spend their time, they may shriek or trumpet their joy when reuniting with preferred companions after a separation.
These animals do not just “exhibit social bonds,” as the stilted language of animal-behavior science often suggests. The emotions that chimpanzees and elephants feel for others are closely bound up with their complex cognitive responses to the world. Chimpanzees are cultural beings who learn their tool-use patterns—fishing for termites, cracking hard nuts, or spearing bush babies in tree holes, depending on where they live—in ways specific to their group. And just like the old cliché, elephants never forget. They remember events vividly, to the point that they may suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder, as when their sleep is disrupted by nightmares after witnessing the killing of relatives or friends by ivory poachers.
Chimpanzees and elephants feel grief. Pioneering women field scientists Jane Goodall, observing chimpanzees in Tanzania, and Cynthia Moss, studying elephants in Kenya, reported years ago firsthand observations of the sorrow these animals felt at the death of loved ones. It’s only natural, then, that chimpanzees and elephants appear in this book. The newest science adds fascinating new depth and details to Goodall’s and Moss’s original reports on grief in these species.
Animal grief is expressed and observed far beyond the African forests and savannahs, however. In this book, we will visit a variety of ecosystems to discover what is known about how wild birds, dolphins, whales, monkeys, buffalo, and bears—even turtles—mourn their losses. We will also peek into homes, and venture onto farms, in order to discover how our companion animals—cats, dogs, rabbits, goats, and horses—experience grief.
Historically,
science has badly underestimated animal thinking and feeling. But now, scientists, often armed with videotaped evidence, are showing us that more animal species think and feel more deeply than we’d ever suspected.
Take goats and chickens, two animals whose potential for thinking and feeling I had, for years, barely given a second thought. How many times had I seen goats clustered in farms or yards, near my home in Virginia or on my travels in Africa, and yet not really seen them—and the same for chickens? Like most people, I create an implicit, mental hierarchy of animals when it comes to cognition and emotion. My working, if subconscious, assumption was that chimpanzees and elephants, on this scale, tower over animals like goats or chickens, who are just there in the background—or on our dinner plates.
Goat is the most widely consumed meat in the world and a dietary staple in Mexico, Greece, India, and Italy. It has also, over the last several years, been edging its way onto upscale plates in the United States. I have not eaten goat; I’ve been a near-vegetarian for a while now. Only recently, after hanging out with some nearby goats, corresponding with friends who have raised goats, and reading Brad Kessler’s memoir
Goat Song
, have I begun to see goats as the complicated creatures they are.
I met Bea and Abby, mother and daughter goats of unknown breed, one sunny afternoon last year. They reside at the 4BarW Ranch, the home of Lynda and Rich Ulrich, near my home in Gloucester County, Virginia. When I met Lynda and Rich, I felt instantly that I was in the presence of like-minded souls. Rescued goats, horses, dogs, and a cat roam the ranch, and my hosts were full of the good stories that animal-rescue people love to exchange.
Bea is a pretty off-white shade, with a wispy beard and a calm manner; her daughter, Abby, is the same color but beardless. Lynda and Rich acquired Bea first, and only six weeks or so later did Abby join the other goats at the ranch, where they roam together through a large enclosure. When Bea and Abby reunited, they expressed what can only be called goat joy. They coo-vocalized, rubbed their faces together, and cuddled together in an explosion of mutual affection that brought tears to Lynda’s eyes.
BEA AND ABBY.
PHOTO BY DAVID L. JUSTIS, MD
.
In
his book, Kessler put it this way:
The longer I spent with our goats, the more complex and wonderful their emotional life seemed: their moods, desires, sensitivity, intelligence, attachments to place and one another, and us. But also the way they communicated messages with their bodies, voices, and eyes in ways I can’t try to translate: their goat song.
Greek tragedies were once known as “goat-songs,” perhaps because goats were given to winners of Athenian drama competitions—and then sacrificed. When that happened, people offered a ritual song, but as we will see later on, goat voices too may lament a death.
Goats do not make tools like chimpanzees do, and it’s probable that they don’t recall past events or experience traumatic memories to the degree that elephants do. Their self-awareness is not as developed, and they wouldn’t, for example, recognize their own images in a mirror. But should chimpanzees and elephants be the gold standard for animal thinking and feeling? Good animal-behavior science has forced us to rethink the tradition of judging apes’ and elephants’ ways of thinking and feeling by the nature of our own. It’s no better a practice to judge all other animals by what chimpanzees and elephants do. Goat thinking and feeling is thinking and feeling.
Chickens, though? From childhood on into my fifties, I consumed hundreds of chickens. Poultry dishes were my favorites when dining out. The terms “chicken intelligence” and “chicken personality” struck me as oxymoronic, not reasonable description of chicken reality. All of this—the diet and the thinking both—have shifted as a result of stories from those who know better.
It started with Jeane Kraines, a friend who keeps chickens at her home in suburban New Jersey. She’s had as many as fourteen at a time and has fallen into the habit of letting them roam the neighborhood to visit the neighbors. “Once I found them at a bridal shower,” she told me, “all the lady guests in a circle around them. In the evening they would come back and I would close the door before nightfall.”